Courier reporter joins West Lothian pupils on educational trip to Auschwitz

Sep 14 2011 By Alistair Watson

auschwitz

A GROUP of eight West Lothian pupils were among a party of 230 students and teachers from across Scotland who visited the notorious death camps at Auschwitz in Poland last week as part of an educational visit organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Courier reporter Alistair Watson joined them.

THE sun was splitting the sky as we wandered amongst the graves at a Jewish cemetery in the Polish town of Oswiecim.
Rows of headstones were visible above the high grass which has been left to grow untended around them.
But there are no flowers on the graves here or relatives to visit them; they are long since gone.
Oswiecim was renamed Auschwitz by the Germans when they occupied Poland in 1939 in their attempt to “Germanise” this part of eastern Europe.
Before the outbreak of war the town had a thriving Jewish population, who had lived there since the 15th century. They were an important part of daily life in the town and many sat on the town council.
Between 60 to 70 per cent of Oswiecim’s pre-war population of 13,000 was Jewish. Only around 140 returned after Europe had been liberated by the allies. Around 40,000 people live there now but there are no longer any Jews in a town which once housed 10 synagogues.
In 2000, Shimshon Klueger, the last remaining Jew, died.
He is buried in the Jewish cemetery but his is one of only a few headstones that actually mark the place where he is buried. After the Germans occupied the town they destroyed the cemetery and took out the gravestones to use them as paving stones.
Those that have been recovered after the war have been laid out in rows or placed together as makeshift monuments to the dead.
The graveyard, which has now been left to nature, has to be kept locked behind high walls and is not visible from the roadside; even now there are those who seek to vandalise it.
The town, synonymous with the death camps that are located in its suburbs, is the first stop on the Holocaust Educational Trust’s one-day visit to Auschwitz for school pupils.
The aim is to show the students what life was like for some of Poland’s 3.5 million Jews who lived in the country before World War Two. Only 6000 remain in Poland today.
HET want the pupils to see that for hundreds of years the Jewish community lived normal lives and died normal deaths in the town. The idea is to humanise and personalise the story of the Holocaust, where an estimated six million people, 90 per cent of them Jews, were murdered by the Nazis.
It is hard to believe, and stomach, that Holocaust denial is on the rise in certain quarters again. But even on the British political landscape there are those who would have us think that the Holocaust never happened or the facts have been overstated.
And this is one of the reasons HET, established in 1988, organise such visits. With the numbers of those who witnessed the true horrors of the Holocaust dwindling as the years go on it won’t be long until that generation is lost forever.
For some the chance to hear first hand the story of a Holocaust survivor may soon be gone.
Into that gap of knowledge these “deniers” could step in and without challenge their version of events could soon be believed by a sizeable minority.
To see off that threat HET aims to give two students from every school across the country a chance to visit the infamous concentration camps in Auschwitz to learn for themselves the terrible deeds and atrocities that were committed here.
Pupils from St Margaret’s Academy, Deans Community High, Linlithgow Academy and Armadale Academy are given the opportunity to visit this time around.
The hope is they will then return to their schools and disseminate the truth of what they saw to fellow pupils and the wider community so that the message and lessons of the Holocaust are not lost.
It is all part of HET’s Lessons from Auschwitz Project, a four-part accredited course, described as a journey of learning and exploration for all. How right they are.
There is not much time to reflect at the graveyard before we make the short trip to Auschwitz I where we are met by a local Polish guide, to ensure our knowledge is uncensored and complete. Whilst today the whole complex is referred to as Auschwitz-Birkenau this actually refers to three separate camps with three different purposes.
Auschwitz I was a former Polish Army barracks that was converted into use as a concentration camp by June 1940. Those arriving at the camp where welcomed with the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei (work makes you free) sign that stands ominously over the entrance. An orchestra would play classical music to mask the horrors of what really lay behind the wrought iron gates and barbed wire fences.
Originally those destined for the camp where political prisoners and the Polish intellectual. Soon it was being used to house prisoners of war, Roma, Sinti and Jews.
The complex had 20 buildings and the Nazis built eight more but after a year it was completely full, housing an estimated 20,000 prisoners. Now it is home to a museum where tourists and pilgrims mingle in stunned silence.
Our first stop was block five. Inside are items seized from those arriving at the camp. We are led past windows containing huge piles of spectacles, children’s toys, prosthetic limbs, around 40,000 pairs of shoes and human hair (around seven tonnes of it was found at the camp after the war; it had been used for carpets and to line gloves for the German army). Battered leather cases lie in piles with names and dates of birth written in white paint on the outside of them. All of these items once had owners, most of whom would have been unlikely to have survived the war. Across Europe the Jews had been told they were leaving the ghettos for a new life in the east. The reality was most of them would be killed on arrival.
Next is block 11 — the death block — where prisoners were sent to await execution. An estimated 20,000 people were shot or hung in the courtyard outside.
“It is very hard to tell how many people died here as we have less than five per cent of the documents and records in the museum today; the rest were destroyed,” our guide tells us.
We are then led to cell 18, which was about the size of a telephone box. This was what was called a starvation cell. Here, in a space not much larger than a phone box, up to five prisoners could be crammed in together and forced to stand for days on end for crimes as trivial as smoking. Many died agonising deaths in these coffin like prisons.
There is also the hospital block, where twisted doctor Josef Mengele and others conducted experiments without anaesthetic on thousands of twins, dwarfs and people with physical abnormalities.
But our last port of call is the last remaining gas chamber still intact at Auschwitz. It was here that the cyanide poison gas Zyklon B was first used on people to test if it would be suitable for mass extermination for those labelled as undesirables by Hitler and the Third Reich.
Its success led the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, to order the construction of a far bigger site, Birkenau (also known as Auschwitz II) which would become not only a work camp but a death camp for the “final solution of the Jewish question”.
We enter this camp under the archway where trains from 21 countries across Europe brought an approximate 1.5 million people. “Around 80 per cent, the majority of whom were Jews, were murdered on arrival,”our guide states.
Many of those who were “lucky” enough to be chosen to work in the camp would only survive for two or three months before succumbing to disease or starvation.
From the watchtower you can survey the 400 acre site that housed more than 300 buildings, which contained up to 100,000 people at its peak. The sheer scale of the camp is hard to comprehend. The Nazis even had plans to increase the site by 50 per cent, so successful was it in its role.
It had a sole purpose  — extermination on a never before seen industrial scale.
Birkenau got its name from the Polish for Birch trees, which line the camp to this day.
As we wander down the railway line that dissects the camp it is hard to imagine that in this quiet and peaceful place so many innocent people were slaughtered.
When we come to the point where the tracks stop — this was the end of the line for many terrified victims of the Holocaust — it is impossible to get a sense of the foreboding and fear these people may have felt.
There at a selection point a Nazi doctor would separate those who had survived the arduous trip in cramped cattle wagons into three lines. Men to the right, women to the left and the elderly, children, the infirm, handicapped, pregnant women and those with small children  — anyone who couldn’t work  — straight ahead.
The final line would be led, like animals to the slaughter, to one of four purpose built extermination buildings. They would be herded into a downstairs building where members of the Sonderkommando (prisoners who worked inside the crematoria) would tell them they were to have a shower. Those undressing were told to remember their peg number so they could find their clothes after showering. They would then step into the gas chambers, disguised a shower room as the pretence continued, where German soldiers would pour Zyklon B into the room through hatches in the roof.
“Twenty minutes was all they needed to kill 2000 people,” our guide informs us. “But it usually took the rest of the day to get rid of the bodies. They needed transported up to the ovens but before that they had to take out any gold teeth and shave their hair off.
“The Sonderkommandos would only last for two or three months before they too were killed. They knew too much and could not be allowed to live.”
Now all that remains is the rubble of these killing factories. The buildings were destroyed by the Germans as they abandoned the camps in a bid to hide what was probably the most monstrous of crimes ever committed in humanity.
The week before our visit the pupils heard the remarkable story of Holocaust survivor Ziggy Shipper. He had arrived at the camp as a 12-year-old and put his survival down to “luck”. He had not returned to Auschwitz until the 60th anniversary of its liberation. Returning, he said, had felt like walking on blood and ashes.
Beside the extermination buildings are large pits, now filled with water, reeds and wildlife. It was here that the Germans poured the ashes of their victims and here they remain untouched as a final resting place.
The buildings lie empty and untouched from the day hwere liberated to give people an idea of the living conditions for prisoners. Hundreds were packed into wooden barracks initially designed to house horses. Those who were lucky shared a bed with several others. Those who weren’t slept on the floor, usually in a seated position due to overcrowding.
On January 27, 1945 when the Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau they discovered 7,650 prisoners made up of the sick and the weak who had been left behind to die. There are no exact figures of those who died at the camp but it is estimated to be 1.2 million; 90 per cent were Jewish.
In a week where we have remembered and paid tribute to the victims of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 it is startling to think that if you added all the victims of the Birkenau camp up it would be like having to endure an attack of that scale every single day for about 500 days.
The last stop is the building where those deemed fit to work were brought to be registered.
“Here they were stripped of their clothes, they were stripped of their clothes, they were tattooed with a number and given a uniform. They were stripped of their humanity,” our educator from the HET tells us.
It is here that we are presented with the final stark images of the day as it is where around 1000 photographs taken from the victims of the camp are displayed. They are photographs that we all have  — wedding photos, baby photos, photos of family and friends. All day we have been encouraged to personalise and humanise the victims of the Holocaust and here they were in black and white staring back at us from the walls. It was a way of reclaiming the humanity they had been stripped of.
A long and demanding day concludes with a talk from Rabbi Barry Marcus, who pioneered the one-day trips to Auschwitz
He said: “There is an ancient custom of standing and observing a minute’s silence in memory of someone who has passed away. If we were to do that here for every victim then we would have to remain silent for three years  — and that’s just Birkenau.
“There is not one of us who doesn’t think we are special in some way. These people were all special, they were all part of families and communities; they all had hopes and aspirations but that was taken away from them because they had the misfortune to be born into the wrong faith.
“These places are a blight on humanity. In Auschwitz it is what you see; in Birkenau it is what you don’t see.
“Whatever brings us here we can walk out again. For your own benefit learn from your experiences and this tragedy. It is not written law that the next victims will be Jews.
“A quote from the philosopher George Santayana adorns the wall in block four at Auschwitz — ‘The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again’.
“Man has conquered almost every distance open to him, except the distance between men.”
More details on HET’s work can be found by visiting the charity’s website at www.het.org.uk.